Implicitly underlying much of the conversation about ISSB, and about the “green transition” in general, is the assumption that capitalism and sustainability can be aligned, that if we have good enough information and are sufficiently focused and skillful, we can solve our existential challenges while still ensuring satisfactory (perhaps even enhanced) returns on existing capital pools. This suggests a necessary gradual diminishment of performance on undesirable, dirty economic activity and a correspondingly more remunerative one on desirable and cleaner ones; such a shift ought to be plainly under way by now, given the advancing state of the crisis and of our awareness of it. But this is from a recent New York Times piece by David Wallace-Wells, titled Missing Profits may be a Problem for the Green Transition:

• In 2022, the global oil and gas industry earned nearly $4 trillion, according to the I.E.A.’s Fatih Birol — two to three times as much profit as they’d made in previous years. That revenue would make the industry, if it were a country, the world’s fifth-largest economy, putting it just a few hundred billion out of third place. For 2023, in what counted as a down year, the five largest companies are expected to send more than $100 billion in dividends and buybacks to shareholders.
• To many environmental activists, this looks like a moral abomination, and to others a challenge for political economy to solve: how to disempower several of the world’s most successful companies. But it also illustrates a seeming paradox about the state of global decarbonization: If renewables are the energy of the future and the green transition is rapidly accelerating, then why are the fossil-fuel dinosaurs so obviously thriving?
• In “The Price Is Wrong,” (Brett Christophers) argues that, for many years now, those fighting for or debating the merits of a green transition have been too fixated on the price of clean energy and not focused enough on how much profit it can be expected to yield. Consumers may like low-cost electricity, but that preference alone isn’t enough to construct a supersized clean grid or the wind and solar farms to power it. ..“The better, more meaningful, yardstick is profit,” and more specifically expected profit, he says, which guides and governs investment decisions far more than any calculation about price. And by that yardstick, renewable energy is not winning but losing the race, with an expected rate of return much lower than those enjoyed by the oil and gas business. Christophers cites a 2023 Bain survey that found that four out of five energy executives believed the main thing slowing the transition was an inability to generate “acceptable returns.”

This implies that the “new economy” isn’t doing much so far to disrupt the prevailing assumptions about wealth and its entitlements; it’s also faltering badly in countering the cynical weaponization of sustainability initiatives as elitist attacks on basic life. For one of many examples, take the conversation around electric vehicles, the substance of which is primarily about their effectiveness in renewing car company super-profits for a new paradigm, only secondarily about their actual practicality and overall virtue. I’d suggest in contrast that any half-successful green transition inherently requires a ramping back of financial expectations conditioned by decades of pillage and reckless growth, which in turn implies a broader social recalibration, a revolution in fact.

Another small but telling sign of how far we are from that though is the widespread willingness to hold up Charles III as a champion of sustainability, when his application of the concept is inseparable from his belief in his own privilege and diligent husbanding of his own obscene wealth. An April 2023 New Yorker article described such twisted practices as how “at Highgrove, his beloved country residence in Gloucestershire… a team of four gardeners lie face down on a trailer as it is dragged by a slow-moving Land Rover, so that they can pull up weeds,” and goes on:

• In (his book) “Harmony,” Charles suggests that the happiest, most just, and most sustainable framework for humans is built on traditional values of community, with individuals enjoying the satisfactions of labor and the consolations of nature within a sturdy social structure…The kinds of pre-industrial societies that Charles admires were headed by a lord of the manor, who, in turn, deferred to a king…As Charles seems to see it, a king should be a benign convener at the head of a natural hierarchy…

A benign convenor to whom all things flow that is, the rewards and benefits of a new cleaned-up world no less disproportionately than those of the old pillage-happy one. And you know, it’s now as plausible for an accountant to pursue a highly-paid career in the sustainability field as in one of the more traditional ones (there’s been yet more commentary recently that a field like audit may become challenged to the point of crisis) . But as I’ve said before, if the field is booming sufficiently to satisfy so many big-dollar desires and ambitions, then it runs a severe risk of becoming another manifestation of the imbalance that underlines many of our sustainability issues in the first place. For now , whether with reference to monarchs or capital pools or to traditional notions of personal remuneration and social differentiation, major disruption and requestioning and realignment remain perilously low down on the agenda…

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.